Virtualization != emulation, and a STEAM-like system could still be used. But my original point stands; for all but the PC games, emulation must be used for a realistic service, as manually porting hundreds or thousands of console and PC games would be impossible for one company to do in such a short span of time.
FLAC seems to often be closer to 50% of the input size, so it is safer to say that an 888kbit upstream would be required. This should be possible on the higher tier cable internet offerings in Quebec (Canada). The companies that offer unmetered connections do not tend to care about upstream usage; I leave my machine on with BitTorrent uploading with a 60KB/s (480kbit) cap for most of the time, and have yet to hear even a single complaint. This is the benefit of being with Bell Canada; they are so huge they do not care.
Unfortunately, all ADSL in Quebec has an upstream of only 800kbit (640kbit usable post-overhead), so it could not do it. It would not have any problem with mono FLAC content however, which might be an option for streaming.
Realistically though, the person who posed the Ask Slashdot didn't really want to stream in FLAC, he just suggested that because he stupidly didn't do any research at all before Asking Slashdot.
3D gaming (of real 3D games, like special LCD screens) has been around for a while. It has never taken off. If nintendo tries to push this, it's a mistake. A waste of time, resources, and for consumers, money.
I would rather they spent R&D resources on REAL innovations.
This is not worthy of an Ask Slashdot question. You did NO research and should have Asked Google first. Try searching for "stream mp3" and shoutcast is the FIRST RESULT.
The player (Usually WinAmp) decodes the content, transcodes it to MP3 or Vorbis, and streams it to the Shoutcast or Icecast server.
I don't believe it can stream FLAC. The point is the guy wants to stream content in either MP3 or FLAC or another format, but doesn't seem to realize that the tools that stream to shoutcast or icecast transcode from the input format to the output format.
For example, when you stream with winamp to shoutcast or icecast, it plays/decodes the input files just like when you normally play content, and then it runs it through an encoder and streams it to the server.
So, I think the parent poster meant, using Icecast you can serve up the transcoded stream.
It says they wrote their own client software. It (Their site) says they're running "original games in their original formats". It says that the games include "arcade and console games". I says that they will launch with 300 and have plans for 1000 total, a number too large to port directly without resorting to emulation.
I think it's pretty obvious and extremely implied that they are (and have to) use emulation.
You are completely wrong. The press release specifically says that the games reside on the local PC and not over a network: "Because games reside securely on the PC, not across a network, they act just as if they were still on the console or at the arcade."
Furthermore, considering they have 300 launch titles and have 1000 total planned, emulation is the ONLY way to get that many arcade and console games running on a PC: porting that many games would be impossible without an enormous investment.
The site does say "Arcade, console, and PC" games, so the PC games could be delivered in a STEAM-like system and run directly without emulation. The rest, which supposedly are "original games in their original formats" have to be emulated.
I suggest you take your own advice and read the site and press release.
The press release says that they're writing their own emulators for these games. While this could be interesting for newer platforms that still don't have very good emulation (They'd be the only people to make emulators licenced by Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft), for older platforms (SNES or older, perhaps even N64 or older) this would be a step backwards.
Using SNES as an example, current emulators are very advanced, highly optimized, and about as good as they're generally going to get. This new company would have to reproduce many years of work that has already been done.
They'd go much further (appeal to a wider audience) renting regular unencumbered ROMs that work with any emulator. If ease-of-use is an issue, they could have their "client" program set up and launch the emulator for the user.
My point is, I don't see this company suddenly producing multiple emulators that are half as good as the opensource emulators that have been in development for years.
The advantage with Flash storage goes beyond just storing simple things like if you've viewed the previews before or not. You can store information related to the interactive menu systems, which could be MORE interactive. Or it could be as simple as storing settings last used for that movie; audio settings, subtitle settings, etc.
This could be solved by flash memory in DVD players. Simply store the DVD's unique ID, and if the previews have already been watched. The cost would be insignificant; 4MB of flash memory could store the information for a nearly a quarter million DVDs. I doubt there are even that many DVDs on the market. Heck, 1MB would probably be enough. How much does 1MB of flash memory cost these days? Probably not enough to significantly raise the cost of the DVD player.
Personally I'd go a more flexible route; use 4MB of flash memory, and a rudimentary file system. Then allow a flexible amount of information to be stored per record. This could be used in new and very interesting ways. You can store a LOT of settings in half a dozen bytes.
I don't think that this will legitimize IGE at all.
Sony claims to own the property in Everquest games. They are letting users charge money to transfer the items to another account. Sony can still claim ownership.
I think that at the same time Sony is doing this, they will continue trying to shut down IGE and the like.
I highly reccomend you download his first (free) CD. Even if you don't think it's anything special, they're still good piano renditions of your favourite songs.
His piano version of the Halo 2 main theme is amazing. I never thought you could do it on a piano!
Here's the funny thing, it's not exactly "no man"...
TONS of sci-fi was or is produced in Canada. Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Battlestar Galactica, Andromeda, Mutant X, and those are just the recent ones filmed in Vancouver that I can recall off the top of my head.
If Enterprise moves to Vancouver (or elsewhere in Canada), it will be joining a group of top-notch sci-fi shows. I mean, Stargate and Battlestar Galactica, AND Enterprise in vancouver, soon Canada might have a monopoly on scifi:P
The super-cheap wireless router from Linksys, the WRT54G (802.11g, 4 port switch, I've seen them for under $35 US) can do exactly this.
Throw on some custom firmware like Sveasoft's (There are opensource solutions too), and you can do real QoS on both the ethernet port, and TCP/IP port levels.
The linksys router is simply a super-cheap MIPS based Linux box running Busybox, with a wireless radio of course. So the routering/firewalling, and I assume QoS, is all done with iptables. You can configure iptables yourself of course, but by default you would want to configure the QoS via the web interface.
Yes, but it's a bit of pride in that Mtl has the main (And possibly the only big) Ubisoft studio. Last I heard it was 1000 employees with plans to expand to 2000. The article in the Gazette was unclear how many jobs were being created in Quebec. Some places they said 200, some they said 2000. And I don't particularly trust other articles, because for all I know they got it from the same flawed/correct source.
However, if these new jobs were added to Montreal, it would be easier for Montrealers to get jobs there, hence why I'm selfishly disappointed;)
I'm disappointed that they're not opening another studio in Montreal. After all, I live in Montreal. It's part pride, and part job availability.
I think it's a mistake anyhow. It isn't that hard to get anglophones (english as mother tongue) to move to Montreal. The company I'm on co-op with in downtown Montreal has more employees from Ontario than Quebec who moved to Montreal just for the job.
However, I doubt as many anglophones would be willing to move to Quebec City. Montreal is huge, and has everything from big-city dense downtown core, to suburbia, to farm land, all on the island of Montreal.
But to repeat (and to be honest), I'd rather they expanded in Montreal because that would make it easier to get a job at Ubisoft.
I work at a company that produces an autonomic distribution of Linux designed solely for small and medium enterprises. Obviously SOME medium enterprises are considering Linux.
I'm running Firefox 1.0.1. I'm STILL waiting for the updater to report that 1.0.2 is available. Even if I manually tell it to check for updates, it says none are available.
If they haven't even put 1.0.2 onto the autoupdater, how long will it be before patches like this make it out? It's pretty stupid.
The cheap $10 power supplies are crap. For one thing, the manufacturers measure their power output at room temperature, not at operating temperature. As a result, a budget-bin 350W PSU might only put out 200W. The makers of higher quality PSUs measure power output at close to average operating temperatures.
And then of course there is actual quality. Cheap PSUs have cheap components, and not very many of them. There is a reason why you can tell the quality of a power supply by it's weight.
So, the reason people need huge power supplies for their desktops is often because they buy cheap power supplies, which aren't producing nearly as much power as they claim. However Shuttle's 240w PSU very likely puts out close to 240w of usable power.
As for optical drives and fast hard drives using more power than CPUs and video cards, I think you need to have a look at the power usages of modern videocards and processors. The newest prescott P4 uses what, 95w? More? And the newest fastest videocards use very nearly that much. Optical drives and hard drives use a fraction of that.
It's one thing to have choice among various OSS projects, but when you have the developers of ONE OSS group maintaining Mozilla Suite, Firefox, and Camino, it seems to me like there is a lot of work being duplicated, and one browser would end up a lot better with all developers working on it.
They say that larger programming teams don't make better products, but I have to argue that, since with good use of CVS and a good bug database, the more people you have fixing bugs the better, so long as you have good communication. And Firefox has no shortage of bugs!
Slashdot Mirror
Virtualization != emulation, and a STEAM-like system could still be used. But my original point stands; for all but the PC games, emulation must be used for a realistic service, as manually porting hundreds or thousands of console and PC games would be impossible for one company to do in such a short span of time.
FLAC seems to often be closer to 50% of the input size, so it is safer to say that an 888kbit upstream would be required. This should be possible on the higher tier cable internet offerings in Quebec (Canada). The companies that offer unmetered connections do not tend to care about upstream usage; I leave my machine on with BitTorrent uploading with a 60KB/s (480kbit) cap for most of the time, and have yet to hear even a single complaint. This is the benefit of being with Bell Canada; they are so huge they do not care.
Unfortunately, all ADSL in Quebec has an upstream of only 800kbit (640kbit usable post-overhead), so it could not do it. It would not have any problem with mono FLAC content however, which might be an option for streaming.
Realistically though, the person who posed the Ask Slashdot didn't really want to stream in FLAC, he just suggested that because he stupidly didn't do any research at all before Asking Slashdot.
3D gaming (of real 3D games, like special LCD screens) has been around for a while. It has never taken off. If nintendo tries to push this, it's a mistake. A waste of time, resources, and for consumers, money.
I would rather they spent R&D resources on REAL innovations.
This is not worthy of an Ask Slashdot question. You did NO research and should have Asked Google first. Try searching for "stream mp3" and shoutcast is the FIRST RESULT.
The player (Usually WinAmp) decodes the content, transcodes it to MP3 or Vorbis, and streams it to the Shoutcast or Icecast server.
I don't believe it can stream FLAC. The point is the guy wants to stream content in either MP3 or FLAC or another format, but doesn't seem to realize that the tools that stream to shoutcast or icecast transcode from the input format to the output format.
For example, when you stream with winamp to shoutcast or icecast, it plays/decodes the input files just like when you normally play content, and then it runs it through an encoder and streams it to the server.
So, I think the parent poster meant, using Icecast you can serve up the transcoded stream.
It says they wrote their own client software. It (Their site) says they're running "original games in their original formats". It says that the games include "arcade and console games". I says that they will launch with 300 and have plans for 1000 total, a number too large to port directly without resorting to emulation.
I think it's pretty obvious and extremely implied that they are (and have to) use emulation.
You are completely wrong. The press release specifically says that the games reside on the local PC and not over a network: "Because games reside securely on the PC, not across a network, they act just as if they were still on the console or at the arcade."
Furthermore, considering they have 300 launch titles and have 1000 total planned, emulation is the ONLY way to get that many arcade and console games running on a PC: porting that many games would be impossible without an enormous investment.
The site does say "Arcade, console, and PC" games, so the PC games could be delivered in a STEAM-like system and run directly without emulation. The rest, which supposedly are "original games in their original formats" have to be emulated.
I suggest you take your own advice and read the site and press release.
The press release says that they're writing their own emulators for these games. While this could be interesting for newer platforms that still don't have very good emulation (They'd be the only people to make emulators licenced by Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft), for older platforms (SNES or older, perhaps even N64 or older) this would be a step backwards.
Using SNES as an example, current emulators are very advanced, highly optimized, and about as good as they're generally going to get. This new company would have to reproduce many years of work that has already been done.
They'd go much further (appeal to a wider audience) renting regular unencumbered ROMs that work with any emulator. If ease-of-use is an issue, they could have their "client" program set up and launch the emulator for the user.
My point is, I don't see this company suddenly producing multiple emulators that are half as good as the opensource emulators that have been in development for years.
The advantage with Flash storage goes beyond just storing simple things like if you've viewed the previews before or not. You can store information related to the interactive menu systems, which could be MORE interactive. Or it could be as simple as storing settings last used for that movie; audio settings, subtitle settings, etc.
This could be solved by flash memory in DVD players. Simply store the DVD's unique ID, and if the previews have already been watched. The cost would be insignificant; 4MB of flash memory could store the information for a nearly a quarter million DVDs. I doubt there are even that many DVDs on the market.
Heck, 1MB would probably be enough. How much does 1MB of flash memory cost these days? Probably not enough to significantly raise the cost of the DVD player.
Personally I'd go a more flexible route; use 4MB of flash memory, and a rudimentary file system. Then allow a flexible amount of information to be stored per record. This could be used in new and very interesting ways. You can store a LOT of settings in half a dozen bytes.
I don't think that this will legitimize IGE at all.
Sony claims to own the property in Everquest games. They are letting users charge money to transfer the items to another account. Sony can still claim ownership.
I think that at the same time Sony is doing this, they will continue trying to shut down IGE and the like.
I highly reccomend you download his first (free) CD. Even if you don't think it's anything special, they're still good piano renditions of your favourite songs.
His piano version of the Halo 2 main theme is amazing. I never thought you could do it on a piano!
Here's the funny thing, it's not exactly "no man"...
:P
TONS of sci-fi was or is produced in Canada. Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Battlestar Galactica, Andromeda, Mutant X, and those are just the recent ones filmed in Vancouver that I can recall off the top of my head.
If Enterprise moves to Vancouver (or elsewhere in Canada), it will be joining a group of top-notch sci-fi shows. I mean, Stargate and Battlestar Galactica, AND Enterprise in vancouver, soon Canada might have a monopoly on scifi
Seems like a ripoff of this Linux-based solution:
p hp
http://nitix.com/technologies/technologies_idb.
The super-cheap wireless router from Linksys, the WRT54G (802.11g, 4 port switch, I've seen them for under $35 US) can do exactly this.
Throw on some custom firmware like Sveasoft's (There are opensource solutions too), and you can do real QoS on both the ethernet port, and TCP/IP port levels.
The linksys router is simply a super-cheap MIPS based Linux box running Busybox, with a wireless radio of course. So the routering/firewalling, and I assume QoS, is all done with iptables. You can configure iptables yourself of course, but by default you would want to configure the QoS via the web interface.
Yes, but it's a bit of pride in that Mtl has the main (And possibly the only big) Ubisoft studio. Last I heard it was 1000 employees with plans to expand to 2000. The article in the Gazette was unclear how many jobs were being created in Quebec. Some places they said 200, some they said 2000. And I don't particularly trust other articles, because for all I know they got it from the same flawed/correct source.
;)
However, if these new jobs were added to Montreal, it would be easier for Montrealers to get jobs there, hence why I'm selfishly disappointed
I'm disappointed that they're not opening another studio in Montreal. After all, I live in Montreal. It's part pride, and part job availability.
I think it's a mistake anyhow. It isn't that hard to get anglophones (english as mother tongue) to move to Montreal. The company I'm on co-op with in downtown Montreal has more employees from Ontario than Quebec who moved to Montreal just for the job.
However, I doubt as many anglophones would be willing to move to Quebec City. Montreal is huge, and has everything from big-city dense downtown core, to suburbia, to farm land, all on the island of Montreal.
But to repeat (and to be honest), I'd rather they expanded in Montreal because that would make it easier to get a job at Ubisoft.
I work at a company that produces an autonomic distribution of Linux designed solely for small and medium enterprises. Obviously SOME medium enterprises are considering Linux.
I'm still not seeing it. If it has already been released, then there is a bug at work. Either way, something has to be fixed.
I'm running Firefox 1.0.1. I'm STILL waiting for the updater to report that 1.0.2 is available. Even if I manually tell it to check for updates, it says none are available.
If they haven't even put 1.0.2 onto the autoupdater, how long will it be before patches like this make it out? It's pretty stupid.
UPS only filter LARGE power disturbances. AVR on APC UPS only filters if the voltage goes outside a 30v range. (12% below or 12% above nominal).
AVR is really useless, because APC UPS can switch to battery on stricter basis than that.
On the other hand, a UPS to filter big disturbances and a very high quality PSU to filter smaller stuff is not a bad combination.
The cheap $10 power supplies are crap. For one thing, the manufacturers measure their power output at room temperature, not at operating temperature. As a result, a budget-bin 350W PSU might only put out 200W. The makers of higher quality PSUs measure power output at close to average operating temperatures.
And then of course there is actual quality. Cheap PSUs have cheap components, and not very many of them. There is a reason why you can tell the quality of a power supply by it's weight.
So, the reason people need huge power supplies for their desktops is often because they buy cheap power supplies, which aren't producing nearly as much power as they claim. However Shuttle's 240w PSU very likely puts out close to 240w of usable power.
As for optical drives and fast hard drives using more power than CPUs and video cards, I think you need to have a look at the power usages of modern videocards and processors. The newest prescott P4 uses what, 95w? More? And the newest fastest videocards use very nearly that much. Optical drives and hard drives use a fraction of that.
If they're counting it, there's something there to count. Idiot.
I would imagine that it would take less work to create a native front-end for Firefox than to code an entirely new browser?
It's one thing to have choice among various OSS projects, but when you have the developers of ONE OSS group maintaining Mozilla Suite, Firefox, and Camino, it seems to me like there is a lot of work being duplicated, and one browser would end up a lot better with all developers working on it.
They say that larger programming teams don't make better products, but I have to argue that, since with good use of CVS and a good bug database, the more people you have fixing bugs the better, so long as you have good communication. And Firefox has no shortage of bugs!